Friday, March 27, 2015

Y chromosome diversity

This Easter Tuesday I thought we could read a paper that would be of
interest to the most of us. There are pretty phylogenetic trees for the
Svensson lab and the main focus is sex chromosomes, which we like in the
Abbott lab :)
10:30 in Argumentet, I'll bring fika.

Title: A recent bottleneck of Y chromosome diversity coincides with a global change in culture

Abstract:It
is commonly thought that human genetic diversity in non-African
populations was shaped primarily by an out-of-Africa dispersal 50–100
thousand yr ago (kya). Here, we present
a study of 456 geographically diverse high-coverage Y chromosome
sequences, including 299 newly reported samples. Applying ancient DNA
calibration, we date the Y-chromosomal most recent common ancestor
(MRCA) in Africa at 254 (95% CI 192–307) kya and detect
a cluster of major non-African founder haplogroups in a narrow time
interval at 47–52 kya, consistent with a rapid initial colonization
model of Eurasia and Oceania after the out-of-Africa bottleneck. In
contrast to demographic reconstructions based on mtDNA,
we infer a second strong bottleneck in Y-chromosome lineages dating to
the last 10 ky. We hypothesize that this bottleneck is caused by
cultural changes affecting variance of reproductive success among males.

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About us

We are a group of evolutionary biologists consisting of three PI:s (Jessica Abbott, Erik Svensson and Tobias Uller), and several postdocs, PhD-students and Master's students. We focus on ecology and phenotypic evolution, and topics as sexual selection and sexual conflict, epigenetic effects, frequency-dependent selection, and speciation processes in natural populations.

Research approaches include experimental evolution, quantitative genetics, experimental field studies of natural and sexual selection, and phylogenetic comparative methods. Our main study organisms are mainly invertebrates (insects, isopods, flatworms), although we also study lizards and birds.